@Carl_Banks Hello again.
It’s sometimes funny seeing ones words quoted verbatim. Although in this case there was no quote or reference. I’ll pop it in here for context:
Currently 3rd paragraph under subsection Wiping a Partition or Whole Disk within the Disks section of the Docs.
I think what @Sky12016 was referencing re DBAN was from the Pre-Install Best Practice (PBP) howto: subsection Wiping Disks (DBAN):
“A popular tool to securely erase HDDs prior to their deployment or disposal is Darils Boot and Nuke. This tools essentially writes to every part of a disks surface and in the process exercises the drive across it’s entire working area. This like the Memory Test (memtest86+) will stress the system; in this case the drives selected for wiping. The purpose here is to first remove all data on the existing drives and second to test that the drive is able to write to all it’s available sectors, it is often the case that a drive is unaware of an issue with itself, via the built in SMART system, until it attempts to write to a faulty sector. In fact this can trigger a drives build in ability to allocate spare sectors reserved for this very purpose.”
@Sky12016 Welcome to the Rockstor community.
I would avoid using the current method for mdraid for system disk as it does entail quite a lot of hoop jumping. @Carl_Banks this is how we addressed your keen point on redundancy in booting media given btrfs is not well served that way, or in fact at all in our re-badged CentOS/RedHat anaconda installer. Forum member @HBDK recently debugged and prove the method, see the following forum thread:
and their consequent pull request on our rockstor-doc repo:
Also note that the USB bus is not well regarded reliability wise so it might be easier to just start out with a single USB device and make sure you store no data on it, ie keep all data on you data disks. And on the point of USB devices that are appropriate, Rockstor is essentially a CentOS install with a NAS app pre-installed plus some scripts. As such it is not light weight and so you will want to use a fairly fast USB key such as the Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 or the like and to make sure that it has wear levelling. A regular cheap key will not cut it and you may experience time outs and failed services, aside form a really slow experience. We have had many forum members not look back once they moved to a more capable system device that that offered by ‘regular’ USB keys, ie regular small hdd or ssd/msata etc.
Also as @Carl_Banks exclamation indicates, pre DBANing is a more extreme measure but well founded never-the-less. Note that it will take ages (many hours per drive) and may just be over the top in a home scenario. Plus the indicated wipe mechanism within Rockstor’s Web-UI is instant, but will only wipe the relevant fs / partition signatures / info: hence the security indicators in the DBAN paragraph above.
OK, bit of post time overlap and I see you have just posted the following:
If you select whole disk (default and recommended) when using the build in wipe it should work as intended. Under the hood it simple executes a “wipefs -a devname”:
Hope that helps.